ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Phylogeographic analysis of the Bantu language expansion supports a rainforest route.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Revisiting the African mtDNA landscape through complete mitochondrial genomes.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Testing the validity and adequacy of linguistic phylogenetic analyses.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Unscrambling the history of African indicine cattle genomes.iScience · 2026Article
- Genomic Signatures of Microgeographic Adaptation in Anopheles coluzzii Across Urban, Rural, and Forested Environments in Gabon.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- A catalogue of early diverged contemporary human genome variation reveals distinct Khoe-San populations.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Projected speaker numbers and dormancy risks of Canada's Indigenous languages.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- African harps as units of cultural evolution: a cladistic analysis on their morphology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- BaTwa populations from Zambia retain ancestry of past hunter-gatherer groups.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Grammars Across Time Analyzed (GATA): a dataset of 52 languages.Scientific data · 2023Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and cultural composition of sub-Saharan Africa. However, the exact dates and routes taken by the ancestors of the speakers of the more than 500 current Bantu languages remain uncertain. Here, we use the recently developed "break-away" geographical diffusion model, specially designed for modeling migrations, with "augmented" geographic information, to reconstruct the Bantu language family expansion. This Bayesian phylogeographic approach with augmented geographical data provides a powerful way of linking linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data to test hypotheses about large language family expansions. We compare four hypotheses: an early major split north of the rainforest; a migration through the Sangha River Interval corridor around 2,500 BP; a coastal migration around 4,000 BP; and a migration through the rainforest before the corridor opening, at 4,000 BP. Our results produce a topology and timeline for the Bantu language family, which supports the hypothesis of an expansion through Central African tropical forests at 4,420 BP (4,040 to 5,000 95% highest posterior density interval), well before the Sangha River Interval was open.
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